Suchergebnisse

Keith Hart on the
Informal Economy, the Great Transformation, and the Humanity of Corporations














International Relations
has long focused on the formal relations between states; in the same way,
economists have long focused exclusively on formal economic activities. If by
now that sounds outdated, it is only because of the work of Keith Hart. Famous
for coining the distinction between the formal and the informal economy in the
1970s, Hart is a critical scholar who engages head-on with some of the world's
central political-economic challenges. In this Talk, he, amongst others, discusses the value of the distinction 40
years after; how we need to rethink The
Great Transformation nearly a century later; and how we need to undo the
legal equivalence of corporations to humans, instituted nearly 150 years back.














Print version of this Talk (pdf)




What is, according to you, the
central challenge or principal debate in International Relations? And what is
your position regarding this challenge/in this debate?







I think it is the lack of fit between politics, which
is principally national, and the world economy, which is global. In particular,
the system of money has escaped from its national controls, but politics, public
rhetoric aside, has not evolved to the point where adequate responses to our
common economic problems can be posed. At this point, the greatest challenge is
to extend our grasp of the problems we face beyond the existing national
discussions and debates. Most of the problems we see today in the world—and the
economic crisis is only one example—are not confined to a single country.







For me, the question is how we can extend our research
from the local to the global. Let the conservatives restrict themselves to
their national borders. This is not to say I believe that political solutions
to the economic problems the world faces are readily available.  Indeed, it is possible that we are entering
another period of war and revolution, similar to 1776-1815 or 1914-1945. Only
after prolonged conflict and much loss might the world reach something like the
settlement that followed 1945. This was not only a settlement of wartime
politics, but also a framework for the economic politics of the peace,
responding to problems that arose most acutely between the wars.  It sounds tragic, but my point in raising the
possibility now is to remind people that there may be even more catastrophic
consequences at stake that they realize already. We need to confront these and
mobilize against them. When I go back in history, I am pessimistic about
resolving the world's economic problems soon, since the people who got us into
this situation are still in power and are still pursuing broadly the same
policies without any sign of them being changed. I believe that they will bring
us all into a much more drastic situation than we are currently facing. Yet in
some way we will be accountable if we ignore the obvious signs all around us.











How did you arrive at where you currently are in your thinking about IR?







My original work in West Africa arose out of a view that
the post-colonial regimes offered political recipes that could have more
general relevance for the world. I actually believed that the new states were
in a position to provide solutions, if you like, to the corrupt and decadent
political structures that we had in the West. That's why, when we were demonstrating
outside the American embassies in the '60s, we chanted the names of the great
Third World emancipation leaders—Frantz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah, Fidel Castro, and so
on.







So for me, the question has always been whether
Africans, in seeking emancipation from a long history of slavery, colonialism, apartheid
and postcolonial failure, might be able to change the world. I still think it
could be and I'm quite a bit more optimistic about the outcome now than I have
been for most of the last fifty years. We live in a racialized world order
where Africa acts as the most striking symbol of inequality. The drive for a
more equal world society will necessarily entail a shift in the relationship
between Africa and the rest of the world. I have been pursuing this question
for the last thirty years or more. What interests me at the moment is the
politics of African development in the coming decades.







Africa began the twentieth century as the least populated
and urbanized continent. It's gone through a demographic and urban explosion
since then, doubling its share
of world population in a century. In 2050, the UN predicts that 24% of the world
population will be in Africa, and in 2100, 35% (read the report here, pdf)! This is because Africa is growing
at 2.5% a year while the rest of the world is ageing fast. Additionally, 7 out
of the 10 fastest growing economies in the world are now African—Asian
manufacturers already know that Africa holds the key to the future of the world
economy.







But, besides Africa as a place, if you will, a number
of anti-colonial intellectuals have played a big role in influencing me. The
most important event in the twentieth century was the anti-colonial revolution.
Peoples forced into world society by Western Imperialism fought to establish
their own independent relationship to it. The leading figures of that struggle
are, to my mind, still the most generative thinkers when we come to consider
our own plight and direction. My mentor was the Trinidadian writer C.L.R. James, with whom I spent a
number of years toward the end of his life. I am by temperament a classicist; I
like to read the individuals who made a big difference to the way we think now.
The anti-colonial intellectuals were the most important thinkers of the 20th
century, by which I mean Gandhi, Fanon and James.







But I've also pursued a very classical, Western
trajectory in seeking to form my own thinking. When I was an undergraduate, I
liked Durkheim and as a graduate student Weber. When I was a young lecturer, I
became a Marxist; later, when I went to the Carribbean, I discovered Hegel,
Kant and Rousseau; and by the time I wrote my book on money, The Memory Bank,
the person I cited more than anyone else was John Locke. By then I realized I
had been moving backwards through the greats of Western philosophy and social
theory, starting with the Durkheim school of sociology. Now I see them as a set
of possible references that I can draw on eclectically. Marx is still probably
the most important influence, although Keynes, Simmel and Polanyi have also shaped my
recent work. I suppose my absolute favorite of all those people is Jean-Jacques
Rousseau for his Discourse on Inequality and his inventive
approach to writing about how to get from actual to possible worlds.











What would a student need (dispositions, skills) to become a specialist
in IR or understand the world in a global way?







In your 20s and 30s, your greatest commitment should
be to experience the world in the broadest way possible, which means learning
languages, traveling, and being open to new experiences. I think the kind of
vision that I had developed over the years was not one that I had originally
and the greatest influence on it was the time I spent in Ghana doing my
doctoral fieldwork; indeed, I have not had an experience that so genuinely
transformed me since!







Even so, I found it very difficult to write a book
based on that fieldwork. I moved from my ethnographic investigations into a
literature review of the political economy of West African agriculture, and it
turns out that I am actually not an ethnographer, and am more interested in
surveying literature concerning the questions that interest me. I am still an
acute observer of everyday life; but I don't base my 'research' on it. Young people
should both extend their comparative reach in a practical way and dig very
deeply into circumstances that they encounter, wherever that may be. Above all,
they should retain a sense of the uniqueness of their own life trajectory as
the only basis for doing something new. This matters more than any professional
training.











Now we see spectacular
growth rates in African countries, as you mentioned, one of which is the DRC.
How can we make sense of these formal growth rates: are they representative of
the whole economies of these countries, or do they only refer to certain
economic tendencies?







The whole question of measuring economic growth is a
technical one, and it's flawed, and I only use it in the vaguest sense as a
general indicator. For example, I think it's more important that Kenya, for
example, is the world leader in mobile phone banking, and also a leader in
recycling old computers for sale cheaply to poor people.







The political dispensation in Africa—the combination
of fragmented states and powerful foreign interests and the predatory actions
of the leaders of these states on their people -- especially the restrictions
they impose on the movements of people and goods and money and so on – is still
a tremendous problem. I think that the political fragmentation of Africa is the
main obstacle to achieving economic growth.







But at the same time, as someone who has lived in
Africa for many years, it's very clear that in some countries, certainly not
all, the economies are very significantly on the move. It's not--in principle—that
this will lead to durable economic growth, but it is the case that the cities
are expanding fast, Africans are increasing their disposable income and it's the
only part of the world where the people are growing so significantly. Africa is
about to enter what's called the demographic dividend that comes when the
active labor force exceeds the number of dependents. India has just gone
through a similar phase.







The Chinese and others are heavily committed to taking
part in this, obviously hoping to direct Africa's economic growth in their own
interest. This is partly because the global economy is over the period of
growth generated by the Chinese manufacturing exports and the entailed infrastructure
and construction boom, which was itself an effect of the greatest shift from the countryside to the city in history. Now, the Chinese
realize, the next such boom will be—can only take place—in Africa.







I'm actually not really interested in technical
questions of how to measure economic growth. In my own writing about African
development, I prefer anecdotes. Like for example, Nollywood—the Nigerian film industry—which has just past
Bollywood as the second largest in the world! You mention the Congo which I
believe holds the key to Africa's future. The region was full of economic
dynamism before King Leopold took it over and its people have shown great
resilience since Mobutu was overthrown and Rwandan and Ugandan generals took
over the minerals-rich Eastern Congo. Understanding this history is much more
important than measuring GDP, but statistics of this kind have their uses if
approached with care.











Is it possible to
understand the contemporary economic predicament that we are seeing, which in
the Western world is referred to as the "crisis", without attributing it to
vague agencies or mechanisms such as neoliberalism?







I have written at great length about the world
economic crisis paying special attention to the problems of the Eurozone. My belief
is that it is not simply a financial crisis or a debt crisis. We are actually
witnessing the collapse of the dominant economic form of the last century and a
half, which I call national capitalism—the attempt to control markets, money
and accumulation through central bureaucracies in the interests of a presumed
cultural community of national citizens.







The term neoliberalism is not particularly useful, but
I try to lay out the history of modern money and why and how national
currencies are in fact being replaced. That, to my mind, is a more precise way
of describing the crisis than calling it neoliberal. On the other hand, neoliberalism does refer to
the systematic privatization of public interests which has become normal over
the last three or four hundred years. The bourgeois revolution claimed to have
separated public and private interests, but I don't think it ever did so. For
example, the Bank of England, the Banque de France, and the Federal Reserve are
all private institutions that function behind a smokescreen of being public
agencies.







It's always been the case that private interests
corrupted public institutions and worked to deprive citizens of the ability to
act purposefully under an ideological veil of liberty. But in the past, they
tried to hide it. The public wasn't supposed to know what actually went on
behind the scenes and indeed modern social science was invented to ensure that
they never knew. What makes neoliberalism new is that they now boast about it
and even claim that it's in everyone's interest to diminish public goods and
use whatever is left for private ends—that's what neoliberalism is.







It's a naked grab for public resources and it's also a
shift in the fundamental dynamic of capitalism from production for profit
through sales tow varieties of rent-seeking. In fact, Western capitalism is now
a system for extracting rents, rather than producing profits. Rents are income
secured by political privilege such as the dividends of patents granted to Big
Pharma or the right to control distribution of recycled movies. This has got
nothing to do with competitive or free markets and much opposition to where we
are now is confused as a result. Sometimes I think western capitalism has
reverted to the Old Regime that it once replaced—from King George and the East
India Company to George W and Halliburton. If so, we need another liberal
revolution, but it won't take place in the North Atlantic societies.











In your recent work,
you refer to The Great Transformation, which invokes Karl Polanyi's famous
analysis of the
growth of 19th century capitalism and industrialization. How can Polanyi
help us to make sense of contemporary global economy, and where does this
inspiring work need to be complemented? In other words, what is today's Great Transformation
in light of Polanyi?







First of all, the
Great Transformation is a brilliant book. I have never known anyone who
didn't love it from the first reading. The great message of Polanyi's work is
the spirit in which he wrote that book, regardless of the components of his
theory. He had a passionate desire to explain the mess that world society had
reached by the middle of the 20th century, and he provided an
explanation. It's always been a source of inspiration for me.







A central idea of Polanyi's is that the economy was
always embedded in society and Victorian capitalism disembedded it. One problem
is that it is not clear whether the economy ever was actually disembedded (for
example capitalism is embedded in state institutions and the private social
networks mentioned just now) or whether the separation occurs at the level of
ideology, as in free market economics. Polanyi was not against markets as such,
but rather against market fundamentalism of the kind that swept Victorian
England and has us in its grip today. The political question is whether politics
can serve to protect society from the excesses produced by this disembedding;
or whether it lends itself to further separation of the economy from society.







And I would say that Polanyi's biggest failure was to
claim that what happened in the 19th century was the rise of "market
society". This concept misses entirely the bureaucratic revolution that was
introduced from the 1860s onwards based on a new alliance between capitalists
and landlords which led to a new synthesis of states and corporations aiming to
develop mass production and consumption. Polanyi could not anticipate what
actually happened after he wrote his book in 1944. An American empire of free
trade was built on a tremendous bureaucratic revolution. This drew on
techniques and theories of control developed while fighting a war on all
fronts. The same war was the source of the technologies that culminated late in
the digital revolution. Karl Polanyi's interpretation of capitalism as a market
economy doesn't help us much to understand that. In fact, he seems to have
thought that bureaucracy and planning were an antidote to capitalist market
economy.







If you ask me what is today's great transformation, I
would prefer to treat the last 200 years as a single event, that is, a period
in which the world population increased from one billion to seven billion, when
the proportion of people living in cities grew from under 3% to around half,
and where energy production increased on average 3% a year. The Great Transformation
is this leap of mankind from reliance on the land into living in cities. It has
been organized by a variety of institutions, including cities, capitalist
markets, nation-states, empires, regional federations, machine industry, telecommunications
networks, financial structures, and so on. I'm prepared to say that in the
twentieth century national capitalism was the dominant economic form, but by no
means all you need to know about if you want to make a better world.







I prefer to look at the economy as being organized by
a plural set of institutions, including various political forms. The Great Transformation
in Polanyi's sense was not really the same Great Transformation that Marx and
Engels observed in Victorian England—the idea that a new economic system was
growing up there that would transform the world. And it did! Polanyi and Marx
had different views (as well as some common ideas), but both missed what
actually happened, which is the kind of capitalism whose collapse is constitutes
the Great Transformation for us today. The last thirty years of financial
imperialism are similar to the three decades before the First World War. After
that phase collapsed, thirty years of world war and economic depression were
the result. I believe the same will happen to us! Maybe we can do something
about it, but only if our awareness is historically informed in a
contemporarily relevant way.











The distinction between
states and markets really underpins much of what we understand about the workings
of world economy and politics. Even when we just say "oh, that's not economic"
or "that's not rational", we invoke a separation. How can we deal with this
separation?







This state-market division comes back to the bourgeois
revolution, which was an attempt to win freedom from political interference for
private economic actors. I've been arguing that states and markets were always
in bed together right from the beginning thousands of years ago, and they still
are! The revolution of the mid 19th century involved a shift from
capitalists representing workers against the landed aristocracy to a new
alliance between them and the traditional enforcers to control the industrial
and criminal classes flocking into the cities. A series of linked revolutions
in all the main industrial countries during the 1860s and early 70s—from the
American civil war to the French Third Republic via the Meiji Restoration and
German unification—brought this alliance to power.







Modernity was thus a compromise between traditional
enforcers and industrial capitalists and this dualism is reflected in the
principal social form, the nation-state. This uneasy partnership has marked the
relationship between governments and corporations ever since. I think that we
are now witnessing a bid of the corporations for independence, for home rule,
if you like. Perhaps, having won control of the political process, they feel
than can go ahead to the next stage without relying on governments.  The whole discourse of 'corporate social responsibility'
implies that they could take on legal and administrative functions that had
been previously 'insourced' to states. It is part of a trend whereby the
corporations seek to make a world society in which they are the only citizens
and they no longer depend on national governments except for local police
functions. I think that it is a big deal—and this is happening under our noses!







Both politicians and economic theorists (OliverWilliamson got a Nobel prize for
developing Coase's theory of the form along these lines)
are proposing that we need to think again about what functions should be
internal to the firm and what should be outside. Perhaps it was a mistake to
outsource political control to states and war could be carried out by private
security firms. The ground for all of this was laid in the late 19th
century when the distinction in law between real and artificial persons was
collapsed for business enterprises so that the US Supreme Court can protect
corporate political spending in the name of preserving their human rights!
Corporations have greater wealth, power and longevity than individual citizens.
Until we can restore their legal separateness from the rest of humanity and
find the political means of restricting their inexorable rise, resistance will
be futile. There is a lot of intellectual and political work still to be done
and, as I have said, a lot of pain to come before more people confront the
reality of their situation.











What role do
technological innovations play in your understanding and promoting of shifts in
the way that we organize societies? Is it a passive thing or a driver of
change?







I wrote a book, the
Memory Bank: Money in an Unequal World
(read it here, with the introduction
here), which centered on a
very basic question: what would future generations consider is interesting
about us? In the late '90s, the dot com boom was the main game in town. It
seemed obvious that the rise of the internet was the most important thing and
that our responses to it would have significant consequences for future
generations.







When I started writing it, I was interested in the
democratic potential of the new media; but most of my friends saw them as a new
source of inequality – digital exclusion, dominance of the big players and so
on. I was accused of being optimistic, but I had absorbed from CLR James a
response to such claims. It is not a question of being optimistic or
pessimistic, but of identifying what the sides are in the struggle to define
society's trajectory. In this case the sides are bureaucracy and the people. Of
course the former wish to confine our lives within narrow limits that they
control in a process that culminates as totalitarianism. But the rest of us
want to increase the scope for self-expression in our daily lives; we want
democracy and the force of the peoples of world is growing, not least in Africa
which for so long has been excluded from the benefits of modern civilization.
Of course there are those who wish to control the potential of the internet
from the top; but everywhere people are making space for themselves in this
revolution. When I see how Africans have moved in the mobile phone phase of
this revolution, I am convinced that there is much to play for in this
struggle. What matters is to do your best for your side, not to predict which
side will win. Speaking personally, Web 2.0 has been an
unmitigated boon for me in networking and dissemination, although I am aware
that some think that corporate capital is killing off the internet. A lot depends
on your perspective. I grew up learning Latin and Greek grammar. The
developments of the last 2-3 decades seem like a miracle to me. I guess that
gives me some buoyancy if not optimism as such.







It's obvious enough to me that any democratic response
to the dilemmas we face must harness the potential of the new universal media.
That's the biggest challenge. But equally, it's not clear which side is going
to win. I'm not saying that our side, the democratic side, is going to beat the
bureaucratic side. I just know which side I'm on! And I'm going to do my best
for our side. Our side is the side that would harness the democratic potential
of the new media. In the decade or more since I wrote my book on money and the
internet, I have become more focused on the threat posed by the corporations
and more accepting of the role of governments. But that could change too. And I
am mindful of the role the positive role that some capitalists played in the
classical liberal revolutions of the United States, France and Italy.











Final Question. I would
like to ask you about the distinction between formal and informal economy which
you are famous for having coined. How did you arrive at the distinction? Does the
term, the dichotomy, still with have the same analytical value for you today?








Around 1970, there was a universal consensus that only states could organize economies for development. You were either a Marxist or a Keynesian, but there were no liberal economists with any influence at that time. In my first publication on the topic (Informal Income Opportunities and Urban Employment in Ghana, read it here, pdf)—which got picked up by academics and the International Labor Organization—I was reacting against that; the idea promoted by a highly formal economics and bureaucratic practice that the state as an idea as the only actor. In fact, people in Third World cities engaged in all kinds of economic activities, which just weren't recognized as such. So my impulse was really empiricist—to use my ethnographic observations to show that people were doing a lot more than they were supposed to be doing, as recorded in official statistics or discussed by politicians and economists.






Essentially, I made a distinction between those things
which were defined by formal regulation and those that lay outside it. I posed
the question how does it affect our understanding in the development process to
know more what people are doing outside the formal framework of the economy.
And remember, this came up in West Africa, which did not have as strong a colonial
tradition as in many other parts of Africa. African cities there were built and
provisioned by Africans. There were not enough white people there to build
these cities or to provide food and transport, housing, clothing and the rest
of it.







In my book on African agriculture, I went further and
argued that the cities were not the kind of engines of change that many people
imagined that they were, but were in fact an extension of rural civilizations
that had effectively not been displaced by colonialism, at least in that
region. Now if you ask me how useful I think it is today, what happened since
then of course is neoliberal globalization, for want of a better term, which of
course hinges on deregulation. So, as a result of neoliberal deregulation, vast
areas of the economy are no longer shaped by law, and these include many of the
activities of finance, including offshore banking, hedge funds, shadow banking,
tax havens, and so on. It also includes the criminal activities of the
corporations themselves. I've written a paper on my blog called "How the
informal economy took over the world" which argues that we are witnessing the
collapse of the post-war Keynesian consensus that sought to manage the economy in
the public interest through law and in other ways that have been dismantled; so,
it's a free-for-all. In some sense, the whole world is now an informal economy,
which means, of course, that the term is not as valuable analytically as it
once was. If it's everything, then we need some new words.







The mistake I made with other people who followed me was
to identify the informal economy with poor slum dwellers. I argued that even
for them, they were not only in the informal economy, which was not a separate
place, but that all of them combined the formal and informal in some way. But
what I didn't pay much attention to was the fact that the so-called formal
economy was also the commanding heights of the informal economy—that the
politicians and the civil servants were in fact the largest informal operators.
I realize that any economy must be informal to some degree, but it is also
impossible for an economy to be entirely informal. There always have to be
rules, even if they take a form that we don't acknowledge as being
bureaucratically normal like, for example, kinship or religion or criminal
gangs. So that's another reason why it seems to me that the distinction has
lost its power.







At the time, it was a valuable service to point to the
fact that many people were doing things that were escaping notice. But once
what they were doing had been noticed, then the usefulness of the distinction
really came into question. I suppose in retrospect that the idea of an informal
economy was a gesture towards realism, to respect what people really do in the
spirit of ethnography. I have taken that idea to another level recently in mywork on the human economy at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. Here, in addition to
privileging the actors' point of view and their everyday lives, we wish to
address the human predicament at more inclusive levels than the local or even
the national. Accordingly, our interdisciplinary research program (involving a
dozen postdocs from around the world, including Africa, and 8 African doctoral
students) seeks ways of extending our conceptual and empirical reach to take in
world society and humanity as a whole. This is easier said than done, of
course.







Keith
Hart is Extraordinary Visiting Professor in the Centre for the Advancement of
Scholarship and Co-Director of the Human Economy Program at the University of
Pretoria, South Africa. He is also centennial professor of Economic Anthropology at the LSE.











Related links










Faculty Profile at U-London


Personal webpage


Read Hart's Notes towards an Anthropology of the Internet (2004, Horizontes Antropológicos) here (pdf)


Read Hart's Marcel Mauss: In Pursuit of a Whole (2007, Comparative Studies in Society and History) here (pdf)


Read Hart's Between Democracy and the People: A Political History of Informality (2008 DIIS working paper) here (pdf)


Read Hart's Why the Eurocrisis Matters to Us All (Scapegoat Journal) here (pdf)









Print version of this Talk (pdf)

On September 17, the al-Qaida affiliate Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wa-l-Muslimin (the Group for Supporting Islam and Muslims, or JNIM) humiliated Mali's military-run government by attacking a police training school in the capital Bamako, as well as the country's national airport. The death toll remains unclear, as the country's authorities seem to be deliberately refusing to give a specific number, but it appears that at least 77 people were killed. This attack is the clearest demonstration yet of the junta's failure, after four years in power, to make good on its promise of securing the country.Although who could secure Mali? The Malian state, both under civilian presidents of the past and now under military authorities, has been skeletal. Since the rebellion of 1990, whenever authorities have been confronted with a major rebellion, they have not been able to enforce peace; authorities have adopted strategies ranging from formal negotiations, selective crackdowns, acquiescing to foreign deployments or, in various ways, dissembling and gaslighting.France thought, from 2013 through the coup of 2020, that it had jihadists on the run, but insecurity worsened and France's welcome evaporated. Since taking power, the current junta has combined crackdowns and gaslighting. Some rebels and communities are subjected to drone strikes and/or massacres, while other conflict zones are left to fester — all while the authorities use a tightly controlled media environment to blanket Bamako, in particular, with a kind of alternate reality. JNIM's attack was so devastating to the junta not just because it claimed lives and disrupted institutions, but also because it trashed the narrative, and did so in the storyteller's own house.If the junta represents a dead end for Mali, that does not mean a change is coming any time soon. Political space is tightly controlled, the military has the support of Russia as well as the enthusiastic camaraderie of two junta-run neighbors, Niger and Burkina Faso, and even a brazen attack on the capital is unlikely to dislodge President Assimi Goïta and his clique.Washington has three broad paths available to it, with each requiring considerable patience. First, Washington can hope that eventually it will once again have a viable counterterrorism partner in Bamako, whether in the form of a matured and chastened form of the junta, or in the form of a successor, civilian-led government. This would be a pitiable outcome, especially if a sham election and a little remorse prove sufficient to bring Bamako, somewhere down the line, back into Washington's good graces without any underlying substantive change in governance.Second, Washington can try to contain the instability in Mali — and in neighboring Burkina Faso and Niger. This represents more or less the current approach, as Washington (and Paris) turn to the coastal West African countries of Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, and Benin as new partners and potential sites for drone bases and more. Attempting to fashion the coastal countries into "bulwarks against extremism," however, risks repeating past mistakes, creating self-fulfilling prophecies (for example, by encouraging governments to target and tar various communities as extremists), and/or distorting domestic politics by pumping money into unaccountable security forces and looking the other way at civilians' abuses of office.Third, Washington can quietly put itself forward as encouraging negotiations and de-escalation. It would be worth leaving the door open to the governments in Bamako, Ouagadougou, and Niamey, not to rush back in with counterterrorism dollars at the first hint of a welcome, but to urge the juntas to consider talking with their enemies.Peace deals with conventional rebels can be frustrating, flawed, and prone to years of wrangling — by all sides, as the ill-fated Algiers Accord (a peace deal for northern Mali) proved from 2015-2024. Yet such peace deals can tamp down tensions and offer a sliver of hope for durable and meaningful resolution of deep tensions between national capitals and aggrieved communities.Peace deals with jihadists, meanwhile, are even harder to countenance — yet the alternative appears to be endless war between, again, tenacious insurgents and skeletal states. In such wars, the insurgents cannot ever hope to control national capitals, as the international state system has even less room for a JNIM-run Mali than it does for a Taliban-run Afghanistan. Yet neither can the juntas (or the civilians who preceded them and who may eventually succeed them) hope to defeat JNIM and its peers; the resources are too limited, the territories too vast, the terrain for recruitment too favorable, especially as each ruler's mistakes compound those of his predecessor.The tragedy for Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger appears to be that there is no apparent limit to how bad the conflict can get. Deaths have soared, particularly in Mali and Burkina Faso; insurgencies expand by fits and starts, and the authorities enflame the situation in various ways: empowering paramilitaries only to get them killed, reigniting old conflicts alongside new ones, and frittering away precious time and resources in diplomatic squabbles.The most promising and realistic way out appears to lie not in the bravado of the juntas somehow magically turning the tide, nor in the hope that popular protests will oust juntas and bring in benevolent civilians, nor yet in the vague idea that there is a one-size-fits-all formula for "counterinsurgency" and "good governance" that could be cooked up in a World Bank conference room or a USAID mission. Rather, someone in Bamako, Ouagadougou, and Niamey will have to, as many who sat in presidential palaces before them did, cut deals with the guys with guns. Otherwise the region will remain caught between the insurgents who won't quit and the soldiers who can't win.

The challenge for rural communities to provide quality education for early childhood in Indonesia is difficult. National politics, policies, and economic and cultural conditions affect the Early Childhood Education system, and Indonesia is a large multicultural country, so, even the quality of education is difficult. This study aims to look at the quality of children's education in Pandalungan. Using qualitative methods with ethnographic design, data collection techniques using interviews, observation, and documentation. The results showed that educational institutions for children in urban areas can be categorized quite high. However, for early childhood education services in Desa Sukorambi Pandalungan, the quality is quite poor. Research suggestions are the need for follow-up related to social, economic, cultural and environmental factors at the level of Pandalungan community awareness of early childhood education. Keywords: Early Childhood, Learning Quality, Pandalungan Community References: Bernal, R., & Ramírez, S. M. (2019). Improving the quality of early childhood care at scale: The effects of "From Zero to Forever." World Development, 118, 91–105. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2019.02.012 Bers, M. U., González-González, C., & Armas-Torres, M. B. (2019). Coding as a playground: Promoting positive learning experiences in childhood classrooms. Computers and Education, 138, 130–145. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2019.04.013 Biersteker, L., Dawes, A., Hendricks, L., & Tredoux, C. (2016). Center-based early childhood care and education program quality: A South African study. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 36, 334–344. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2016.01.004 Burchinal, M. (2018). Measuring Early Care and Education Quality. Child Development Perspectives, 12(1), 3–9. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdep.12260 Church, A., & Bateman, A. (2019). Methodology and professional development: Conversation Analytic Role-play Method (CARM) for early childhood education. Journal of Pragmatics, 143(xxxx), 242–254. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2019.01.022 Ciolan, L. E. (2013). Play to Learn, Learn to Play. Creating Better Opportunities for Learning in Early Childhood. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 76, 186–189. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2013.04.096 Correia, N., Camilo, C., Aguiar, C., & Amaro, F. (2019). Children's right to participate in early childhood education settings: A systematic review. Children and Youth Services Review, 100, 76–88. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2019.02.031 Cycyk, L. M., & Hammer, C. S. (2018). Beliefs, values, and practices of Mexican immigrant families towards language and learning in toddlerhood: Setting the foundation for early childhood education. Early Childhood Research Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2018.09.009 Dick, C. & C. (2009). The Sistematic Design Of Instruction. New Jersey: Upper Saddle River. Grindal, T., Bowne, J. B., Yoshikawa, H., Schindler, H. S., Duncan, G. J., Magnuson, K., & Shonkoff, J. P. (2016). The added impact of parenting education in early childhood education programs: A meta-analysis. Children and Youth Services Review, 70, 238–249. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2016.09.018 Herbers, J. E., Cutuli, J. J., Jacobs, E. L., Tabachnick, A. R., & Kichline, T. (2019). Early childhood risk and later adaptation: A person-centered approach using latent profiles. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 62(January), 66–76. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appdev.2019.01.003 Hunkin, E. (2018). Whose quality? The (mis)uses of quality reform in early childhood and education policy. Journal of Education Policy, 33(4), 443–456. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2017.1352032 Johson, J. E, & Roopnarine, J. L. (2011). Pendidikan anak usia dini dalam berbagai pendekatan. Jakarta: Kencana Prenada Media Group. Lucas, F. M. M. (2017). The Game as an Early Childhood Learning Resource for Intercultural Education. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 237(June 2016), 908–913. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2017.02.127 Atwi Suparman. (2012). Desain Intruksional Modern. Jakarta: Erlangga. Mapiare, A. (2013). Tipe-tipe Metode Riset Kualitatif Untuk Eksplanasi Sosial Budaya Dan Bimbingan Konseling. Malang: Elang Emas & Prodi Bimbingan Dan Konseling Fakultas Ilmu Pendidikan Universitas Negeri Malang. Milner, K. M., Bhopal, S., Black, M., Dua, T., Gladstone, M., Hamadani, J., … Lawn, J. E. (2019). Counting outcomes, coverage and quality for early child development programmes. Archives of Disease in Childhood, 104, S3–S12. https://doi.org/10.1136/archdischild-2018-315430 Morrison, G. S. (2012). Dasar-dasar Pendidikan Anak Usia Dini. Jakarta: Indeks. Nutbrown, C. (2011). Key Concepts in Early Childhood Education and Care (2nd ed.). London: SAGE Publication Ltd. Perpres. Pelaksanaan Pencapaian Tujuan Pembangunan Berkelanjutan. , 6 Peraturan Presiden RI § (2017). Puspita, W. A. (2013). Multikulturalisme dalam Pendidikan Anak Usia Dini. Jurnal Ilmiah VISI P2TK PAUDNI, 8(2), 144–152. Raikes, A., Sayre, R., Davis, D., Anderson, K., Hyson, M., Seminario, E., & Burton, A. (2019). The Measuring Early Learning Quality & Outcomes initiative: purpose, process and results. Early Years, 39(4), 360–375. https://doi.org/10.1080/09575146.2019.1669142 Satrio Roefandi, P. (2019). Keluarga Pendalungan, Keluarga Berbasis Budaya Madura Atau Jawa? 10 Th Psychofest Conference, (March), 316–324. https://doi.org/10.31227/osf.io/v8g5b Stokoe, E. (2014). The Conversation Analytic Role-play Method (CARM): a method for training communication skills as an alternative to simulated role-play. Res. Lang. Soc. Interact, 47(3), 255–265. Sutarto, A. (2006). Sekilas Tentang Masyarakat Pandalungan. Jelajah Budaya 2006, 1–7. Suyadi. (2010). Psikologi Pendidikan Anak Usia Dini. Yogyakarta: Pustaka Insan Madani. Tapscott, D. (2011). Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation Is Changing Your World. Bucharest: Publica. Wijana, W. D. (2014). Konsep-Konsep Dasar Pendidikan Anak Usia Dini. In UT. https://doi.org/10.1101/112268 Yoshikawa, H., Wuermli, A. J., Raikes, A., Kim, S., & Kabay, S. B. (2018). Toward High-Quality Early Childhood Development Programs and Policies at National Scale: Directions for Research in Global Contexts. Social Policy Report,31(1), 1–36. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2379-3988.2018.tb00091.x

Soon after the terrorist attacks of September 11 Southeast Asia became a focus of American anti-terror strategy. Indonesia is not only the world's largest Muslim nation but also a politically instable state and in a desperate economic condition. The region as a whole still suffers from the aftereffects of the Asian crisis of 1997. On top of that religious and social changes have lead to growing instability and anti-American tendencies in Southeast Asian societies. The governments, however, have pledged support to US-antiterrorist policies. In the US view Southeast Asia has gained in strategic importance. However, the US and its Southeast Asian allies are walking a tight line: If their anti-terrorist measures go too far, this might undermine democratic reforms and increase the attractiveness of Islamism to the public. (Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft / FUB)

The standard advice given to personal investors is to "diversify." Spreading wealth across a variety of assets reduces the harm negative shocks can inflict on the overall portfolio. Global supply chains work the same way. Diversified supply chains are safer and more resistant to disruption.For the US, its main concern is reliance on China. It supplies almost 20% of US healthcare imports and more than 30% of information technology imports. This over-dependence on a strategic rival fuels America's current efforts to de-risk, including investments to reshore critical production. The risk is particularly glaring in mineral imports, where China is not just a leading producer of raw materials, but also a hub of processing and distribution. But data show that the US consumes more from China than it needs to. There are alternative suppliers of minerals with which the US could be doing more business. Deepening partnerships with these other countries will help diversify America's imports and will bolster supply chain resilience. A diversification problemCritical dependencies aren't just about how much a country imports. They're about whether supply chains are diverse enough to limit exposure to costly disruptions. Minerals illustrate the point. Minerals accounted for only 2.5% of America's critical goods imports in 2023, lagging big-ticket items such as pharmaceuticals (18%) and communication technologies (34%).[i] Yet that relatively small amount of trade is vitally important to making things such as medicines, semiconductors, and many other goods on which the US would prefer to be less dependent on foreign suppliers. The problem is that minerals imports are far less diversified than other critical goods.[ii] The US gets most of its critical minerals from just a few countries – and that small list includes China. There are 44 minerals for the America is heavily "import-dependent" according to the US Geological Survey.[iii] That means the US gets at least 50% of its total supply of those minerals from abroad. China is a top-3 supplier of 26 of those 44 minerals. Several of those are minerals that the US gets a full 100% of its supply from abroad, including graphite, arsenic, and mica. Each of these has important applications in a variety of sectors. The "over-consumption gap" One reason minerals imports are less diversified is simply that not every country has rich endowments of natural resources. Minerals aren't like shoes or car parts, which can be made just about anywhere. But even when taking natural endowments into account, the US buys more from China than it needs to. Table 1 reports the gap between China's share of US imports and its share of global exports. In each case, there's at least a 17-point difference between the two shares. That distance – the "overconsumption gap" – suggests there are other potential suppliers in the global marketplace that the US may be underutilizing. Table 1. America buys a disproportionate share of minerals for China
Notes: Import dependence numbers from the US Geological Survey's Mineral Commodity Summaries 2023. Imports and exports data from the World Bank's World Integrated Trade Solution database for 2023 trade flows.Image CreditThere are alternative markets with which the US could do more business in each of the 10 minerals listed in Table 1. For example, India exports 9 of them, Malaysia 7, South Africa 6, and Brazil 4. But right now, the US gets only 5% of its supply from those countries, whereas 55% comes from China. And smaller markets offer promise as well. Consider graphite, which is used in batteries, lubricants, and nuclear power. The US gets all of its graphite from abroad, and 74% of that is from China. But Mozambique and Madagascar are also major exporters, accounting for a combined 17% of global exports. Today, the US gets just 8% of its graphite from those two countries. Doubling imports from those two countries would cut graphite consumption from China by 12%. Moving forwardHow can these dependencies be addressed? The US could reduce its dependence on China simply by purchasing more from those other suppliers, but this is not easily done. It requires investment. There's a reason why China has become a hub for much of the world's mineral processing and distribution–its active engagement abroad. China's aggressive approach to investment has seen Beijing dedicate enormous capital to mineral rights, extractive infrastructure, and refining capacity around the world. Given the stiff competition for critical minerals, the US needs to make similar commitments abroad. There are already a variety of MOUs with African and Asian partners. The next step is to make meaningful investments in infrastructure in these countries to bolster production capacity in raw materials and eventually in intermediate goods processing. At the same time, the US must incentivize partners to do business with America by offering tangible market access. This means rebooting trade deals to lock strategic partners into cooperative arrangements in critical sectors. The net result will be greater diversification—and less risk. [i] All numbers come from author's analysis of data on 2023 trade data from the US Census Bureau's USA Trade Online as well as statistics from the World Bank's World Integrated Trade Solution. [ii] A Herfindahl Index—a traditional measure of dispersion—shows that minerals imports are far more concentrated (0.12) than all other critical goods imports (0.07). [iii] Import dependence is measured as the share of aggregate demand accounted for by imports. See U.S. Geological Survey, 2023, Mineral commodity summaries 2023: U.S. Geological Survey, https://doi.org/10.3133/mcs2023.

The standard advice given to personal investors is to "diversify." Spreading wealth across a variety of assets reduces the harm negative shocks can inflict on the overall portfolio. Global supply chains work the same way. Diversified supply chains are safer and more resistant to disruption.For the US, its main concern is reliance on China. It supplies almost 20% of US healthcare imports and more than 30% of information technology imports. This over-dependence on a strategic rival fuels America's current efforts to de-risk, including investments to reshore critical production. The risk is particularly glaring in mineral imports, where China is not just a leading producer of raw materials, but also a hub of processing and distribution. But data show that the US consumes more from China than it needs to. There are alternative suppliers of minerals with which the US could be doing more business. Deepening partnerships with these other countries will help diversify America's imports and will bolster supply chain resilience. A diversification problemCritical dependencies aren't just about how much a country imports. They're about whether supply chains are diverse enough to limit exposure to costly disruptions. Minerals illustrate the point. Minerals accounted for only 2.5% of America's critical goods imports in 2023, lagging big-ticket items such as pharmaceuticals (18%) and communication technologies (34%).[i] Yet that relatively small amount of trade is vitally important to making things such as medicines, semiconductors, and many other goods on which the US would prefer to be less dependent on foreign suppliers. The problem is that minerals imports are far less diversified than other critical goods.[ii] The US gets most of its critical minerals from just a few countries – and that small list includes China. There are 44 minerals for the America is heavily "import-dependent" according to the US Geological Survey.[iii] That means the US gets at least 50% of its total supply of those minerals from abroad. China is a top-3 supplier of 26 of those 44 minerals. Several of those are minerals that the US gets a full 100% of its supply from abroad, including graphite, arsenic, and mica. Each of these has important applications in a variety of sectors. The "over-consumption gap" One reason minerals imports are less diversified is simply that not every country has rich endowments of natural resources. Minerals aren't like shoes or car parts, which can be made just about anywhere. But even when taking natural endowments into account, the US buys more from China than it needs to. Table 1 reports the gap between China's share of US imports and its share of global exports. In each case, there's at least a 17-point difference between the two shares. That distance – the "overconsumption gap" – suggests there are other potential suppliers in the global marketplace that the US may be underutilizing. Table 1. America buys a disproportionate share of minerals for China
Notes: Import dependence numbers from the US Geological Survey's Mineral Commodity Summaries 2023. Imports and exports data from the World Bank's World Integrated Trade Solution database for 2023 trade flows.Image CreditThere are alternative markets with which the US could do more business in each of the 10 minerals listed in Table 1. For example, India exports 9 of them, Malaysia 7, South Africa 6, and Brazil 4. But right now, the US gets only 5% of its supply from those countries, whereas 55% comes from China. And smaller markets offer promise as well. Consider graphite, which is used in batteries, lubricants, and nuclear power. The US gets all of its graphite from abroad, and 74% of that is from China. But Mozambique and Madagascar are also major exporters, accounting for a combined 17% of global exports. Today, the US gets just 8% of its graphite from those two countries. Doubling imports from those two countries would cut graphite consumption from China by 12%. Moving forwardHow can these dependencies be addressed? The US could reduce its dependence on China simply by purchasing more from those other suppliers, but this is not easily done. It requires investment. There's a reason why China has become a hub for much of the world's mineral processing and distribution–its active engagement abroad. China's aggressive approach to investment has seen Beijing dedicate enormous capital to mineral rights, extractive infrastructure, and refining capacity around the world. Given the stiff competition for critical minerals, the US needs to make similar commitments abroad. There are already a variety of MOUs with African and Asian partners. The next step is to make meaningful investments in infrastructure in these countries to bolster production capacity in raw materials and eventually in intermediate goods processing. At the same time, the US must incentivize partners to do business with America by offering tangible market access. This means rebooting trade deals to lock strategic partners into cooperative arrangements in critical sectors. The net result will be greater diversification—and less risk. [i] All numbers come from author's analysis of data on 2023 trade data from the US Census Bureau's USA Trade Online as well as statistics from the World Bank's World Integrated Trade Solution. [ii] A Herfindahl Index—a traditional measure of dispersion—shows that minerals imports are far more concentrated (0.12) than all other critical goods imports (0.07). [iii] Import dependence is measured as the share of aggregate demand accounted for by imports. See U.S. Geological Survey, 2023, Mineral commodity summaries 2023: U.S. Geological Survey, https://doi.org/10.3133/mcs2023.

학위논문(석사)--서울대학교 대학원 :국제대학원 국제학과(국제지역학전공),2019. 8. Song, Jiyeoun. ; 초록 운송 비용의 절감과 정보에 대한 용이한 접근은 사람들이 한 곳에서 다른 곳으로 이동하는 경향을 증가시켜 개발 도상국에서 선진국에 이르기까지 국제적인 국제 이주 경향을 증폭시켰다. 아프리카는 이주민이 주로 공급되는 지역 중 하나이다. 해당 지역 사회는 세계에서 가장 많은 이동을 보이고 있다. 경제, 정치, 기후문제 및 분쟁에서 벗어나 경제적 번영과 정치적 안정을 찾아 주로 유럽으로 이주한다. 수십 년 동안 많은 연구자들이 이주의 파급 효과로 인해 해당 국가에게 사회 경제적 안정성에 유해한 현상을 강조하면서 이주가 두뇌 유출과 연관 되어왔다. 그러나 이러한 비관적인 견해는 이민자들이 출생국에 기여하는 낙관적인 요소를 고려하면 출생국의 발전에 기여한 것을 알 수 있다. 예를 들어 송금 및 외국인 직접 투자와 같은 재정적 기여는 경제 성장과 모국의 산업 변형을 저해하는 유동성의 희소성을 해결하는 데 중요한 역할을 한다. 외국인 직접 투자 (FDI)에 관한 한, 많은 학자들은 이주자와 정확하게 이주하는 나라가 외국인 직접 투자의 유입 국가에 긍정적 인 영향을 미친다고 주장하면서 이주와 외국인 투자의 긍정적인 상관 관계를 증명 하였다. 비록 관련되었지만 대부분이 아시아 국가들을 대상으로 한 기존 연구들은 아프리카 국가들, 정확하게는 사하라 이남 국가들을, 고려하지 않은 연구였다. 본 연구의 목표는 중앙아프리카 경제 공동체(CEMAC) 지역의 국가인 카메룬의 상황을 평가하기 위해 상대적 질적 방법론을 사용하여이 기존연구의 한계로 인해 채우지 못한 공백을 채우는 것이다. 수집 된 데이터를 분석 한 결과, 해당 경제공동체에서 카메룬이 이민자의 주요 공급자인 것으로 나타났고 이러한 이유로 경제적 공동체의 다른 회원국에 비해 외국인직접투자를 우선으로 수령하는 국가로 예측하였다. 그러나 양적 관측에서, 즉 CEMAC에서 FDI의 분포와 결과적으로 하위 지역의 FDI의 주요 추진 요인을 이해하기위한 회귀 분석의 사용 했을시 전혀 다른 결과가 나왔다. 결론적으로, 아시아와 같은 세계의 다른 지역과 달리 해당 지역의 투자자들이 천연 자원에 관심을 갖게됨에 따라 외국으로의 이민이 FDI의 동인이되지 못한다는 것이 드러났다. ; Abstract The reduction of transportation cost and the easy access to information have increased the propensity of people to move from one place to another thus amplifying the global international migration trend, generally from developing to developed countries. Africa appears among the main providers of migrants as its community is one of the most mobile in the world. Running away from economic, political, climatic and security struggles, they mainly migrate to Europe thanks to its economic prosperity and political stability. For many decades migration has been assimilated to brain drain by many researchers presenting the phenomenon as harmful for the socioeconomic stability of sending countries. But this pessimistic view has given the way to a more optimistic consideration that gives credit to migrants and migration as contributors to the development of sending country. Their financial contributions, for instance remittances and Foreign Direct Investments, play a key role in solving liquidity scarcity that hampers the economic growth and the industrial transformation of home country. As far as FDI is concerned, many scholars have concluded on a positive correlation between migration and FDI arguing that migrants and precisely tertiary migrant do influence positively attraction of Foreign Direct Investment in Sending country. Though pertinent, these studies, mostly directed towards Asian countries, omitted to include African countries and precisely sub-Saharan countries. The aim of this work is to fill this vacuum using comparative qualitative methodology to assess the situation in Cameroon among countries of the CEMAC sub-region. From the analysis of the collected data, it appears that Cameroon in the sub Region is the main provider of migrants, suggesting therefore that it would be the first recipient of FDI among its peers of the economic community. But the results obtained from the quantitative observation proved otherwise, implying thus the use of another method, namely regression analysis, to understand the distribution of FDI in CEMAC and consequently the main drivers of FDI in the sub-Region. It emerged finally that, unlike in other regions of the globe like Asia; migrant stock is not a driver of FDI as investors in the regional are interested by natural resources. ; Table of content Graphs and tables iv List of abbreviations v Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION 1 1.1 Background of the study 1 1.2 Statement of the problem 2 1.3 Objective of the study 3 1.4 Research question 3 1.5 Hypothesis 3 1.6 Significance of the study 4 1.7 Organization of the study 4 Chapter 2. Literature review 6 2.1 Explanation of key terms 6 2.2 Related literature 7 Chapter 3. CAMEROON FACING THE CHALLENGE OF INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION: THE STATE OF PLAY 12 3.1 Introduction 12 3.2 Overview of Cameroonian emigration 12 3.3 Factors of migration 14 3.4 Profile of Cameroonian emigrants in Africa 14 3.5 Cameroon intellectual elite in developed countries: tertiary migrants 15 3.6 Major destinations of Cameroon tertiary emigrants 16 3.7 Cameroon in CEMAC: comparison of tertiary migrant stocks 17 Chapter 4. MIGRATION POSSIBLE TRIGGER OF FOREIGN DIRECT INVESTMENT 21 4.1 Introduction 21 4.2 Allocation of FDI to Cameroon 21 4.3 The nexus Migration-FDI rooted in social construction 21 4.4 FDI and Migration stock: the share of Cameroon in CEMAC 22 Chapter 5. EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS: THE EFFECTS OF MIGRATION ON FDI INFLOW 28 5.1 Introduction 28 5.2 The approach 28 5.3 Data 29 5.4 Procedure 30 5.5 The variables object of our study 31 5.5.1 Dependent variable 31 5.5.2 Independent variables 31 5.6 Results 32 5.7 Explanation of the non correlation of migrants and tertiary migrants 36 5.7.1 The exclusion of naturalized citizens 36 5.7.2 Migrant networks as pressure groups 37 Chapter 6. CONCLUSION 39 초록 45 Acknowledgements 46 ; Master